“Command?”

“Form a column.”

The droids snapped into action immediately, and Rogers stepped back with a satisfied grin as the whole orchestra started to play the same tune with Rogers on the conductor’s stand. Despite his feelings about droids, he couldn’t help but feel a little bit of pride as the droids started smoothly interchanging positions, not running into anything at all, and . . .

Tearing the metal panels off the walls.

“What the hell are you doing?” Rogers cried. “Stop!”

The inert command pad didn’t help him, since it had locked itself again. Slamming his card through the reader, he was greeted only with a crudely drawn—not rendered like regular graphics, but drawn as though by a five-year-old—picture of a battery with a line through it. It was out of charge.

“Tunger,” Rogers shouted, “this is your fault!”

“My fault?”

“This isn’t very orderly at all. The damn thing is out of batteries!”

The droids, in the meantime, had convened in the center of the training room, bringing with them pieces of the walls, exposing part of the vast network of pipes, wires, cables, and whatever else made up the guts of the Flagship. Arms flashing in silver-gray blurs, they extended and retracted, the droids’ legs telescopically reaching higher until they were at the ceiling. In moments, a crudely but solidly crafted shaft of metal ran from floor to ceiling in the center of the room, like one of those senseless metal sculptures in backwater museums.

“What have you done?” Rogers cried once the noise settled down. “You’ve ruined the training room!”

“We have formed a column, sir,” Oh One said. “Utilizing the best available strategy.”

Rogers stared blankly at the almost certainly laughing eyes of the Froid, wondering if they could do things out of spite, wondering if this was all a joke and Magistrate Tuckalle was about to burst through the door, red-faced with laughter, and tell him that the Awesome had been repaired and he could go on his merry way.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, the AIGCS stood around their newly formed monument of stupidity, looking at Rogers to give them their next command.

“Low battery,” chirped the command pad.

Rogers looked at the command pad, looked at the tangled mess of metal, and looked at Tunger.

“Charge this,” he said, throwing it at Tunger, who caught it and saluted with a snap. “And get me an instruction manual. I’m going to go eat a Sewer rat.”

“The presence of rodents, while a viable food source, is unlikely in this ship’s waste disposal system, sir,” Oh One offered helpfully. “It is unlikely that you will find one.”

“I’ll use the best available strategy and see what happens,” Rogers said, and left.

Barber Bot

Picking the last traces of a SEWR rat out of his teeth and wondering how much money he would pay for a good slab of steak, Rogers slowly plodded through the halls back to his room on the quarterdeck. He felt like someone had taken everything good about life and used it as toilet paper. Like he could still see the traces of a life full of drinking and gambling and fun, but there was a lot of poop in the way. Was this automated technology really the future of the Meridan Patrol Fleet? Was it really his future for the next three long, long years?